


Autumn Dreaming :: Solstice

by Nell65



Series: Autumn Dreams [16]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Universe, F/F, F/M, post season two
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-25
Updated: 2015-09-30
Packaged: 2018-04-23 08:16:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4869761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nell65/pseuds/Nell65
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was December 22, 2149, and the top of Mount Weather was a very cold place to be.</p><p>So naturally, the Arkers were having a party. They also invited members of Trikru to join them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Octavia

**Author's Note:**

> I decided to keep this as a series, despite that fact that it's one connected story, because it still feels true to the way I see the story as a collage, made up of bits and pieces, rather than following one POV on a single, strong narrative line.

“Is this a party? Or a ceremony?” Lincoln asked.

“Both, I guess?” Octavia answered. “It’s a party first, and then a ceremony. And then a little more party.”

“I didn’t realize you had ceremonies.”

“Wait until Unity Day – we totally have ceremonies. And usually parties with the ceremonies.”

“When the twelve stations joined together to build the Ark, right?”

“Give the smart boy an A, and send him to the head of the class!” Octavia beamed up at him, and he leaned down for a kiss. 

“Oh, God, hurry it up, will you? My nuts are freezing out here!” Monty complained.

They were half way across the not very long strip of hard ground from the gate to the meeting hall. It was December 22, 2149, and the top of Mount Weather was a very cold place to be.

It was the night of the winter solstice, their first on the ground, and the Arkers were coming together to celebrate. Even all the guard shifts had been shortened to two-hour rotations, so that everyone who wanted would have a chance to participate as much as possible. In fact the only ones who couldn’t make it at all were those manning Camp Jaha and the Drop Ship. They were having their own small gatherings.

They could have used the big ballroom inside, but the Council had extended an invitation to Lexa and the Woods Clan, inviting them to be part of the Ark’s most (only?) important winter event. Ordinarily, with rare exceptions such as Lincoln or Echo and escorted guests or visitors, Grounders were barred from the fortress itself.

Besides, Octavia thought, it was nice to be out in the black. See the night sky in its fullest display. Octavia hadn’t realized it at first, in those early frantic weeks, but it was actually possible to miss the deep black sky. Miss starlight and moonlight. Miss the stars. 

She knew she wasn’t the only one born and raised on the Ark who liked the night. Who felt like she could breath more freely, more deeply, secure in the vastness of space around them.

The Meeting Hall wasn’t nearly big enough, of course. It had been ringed with heated tents, for food and hot drinks and a respite from the pounding musical beat coming from the open doors. 

They shouldered their way inside, pushing through until they could find a spot where they could watch the dancing. Someone had rigged up mirrored balls and strobe lights. The small stage was covered in sound equipment, a skinny kid named Diesel manning the board.

The place was swarming with Arkers, and it looked like a hundred or so Grounders had taken up the Council’s invitation. About half of them were familiar faces for Octavia, former patients, recovered reapers who’d never really left, or regular visitors to the Exchange. The rest were from TonDC and even a few from Polis. 

Indra was there, standing next to her son, who had finally decided to leave his bed. They were at one of the small, tall tables with Chancellor Griffin, Kane, Echo and Bellamy, and other muckety mucks.

Lexa had come as well, surrounded as always with her retinue of advisors and bodyguards and, a date?

“Lincoln,” Octavia tugged on his sleeve. “Who’s that girl, holding hands with Lexa?”

Lincoln looked, then shook his head. “I don’t know. From Polis, I guess.”

“Is she Lexa’s date?”

“Date?”

“You know, when you’re interested in someone and trying to get to know them, so you invite them for coffee or to take a walk? Or to a party?”

“Oh. That practice doesn’t have a name, but I know what you’re talking about.” He shrugged, “but that’s not really an option for the Commander. Her companions tend to be… I guess you’d say, members of her staff.”

“Like… _paid_?”

“Is Bellamy paid to be on Kane’s staff?”

“Well, first of all, Bellamy is not literally sucking Kane’s dick, if that’s what that girl’s job is, but yeah. We all get paid. Even you.”

“We do?”

“Yes! In credits that count toward housing, food, time off, wardrobe, goods at the Exchange.”

“I’ve been paid… in these credits?”

“Yes. Lincoln! I was with you when Sinclair explained this all to us.”

“I understood that we received food and housing and other supplies in exchange for our labor.”

“Yes. We do. But, everything is calculated in discrete units of value. Credits. So that if, say, one person gets a crappy room or a crappy pair of boots, because we’ve run out of all the good ones, they get more of something else. So that way everyone knows that for the same level of work, they get the same credit in return.”

“Do our room and our food take all our credits?”

“You are just now asking me this question?”

“I didn’t understand it was a question that could be asked.”

“No. We have a positive balance. Savings.”

“You will have to show me how this works. Tomorrow.” He nodded at the dance floor and grinned at her. “I think I’ve figured out that there aren’t any special steps.”


	2. Clarke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke danced.

Clarke danced. 

She had been restless and grumpy about going to the Solstice Party. Dreading the crowds, the noise, the heat, Lexa.

Oh yes. Once she knew that Lexa was definitely planning to attend, AND bringing a retinue, she dreaded it like whoa.

But her mom chivied her into going with her own special blend of guilt, expectation and love.

By the time she arrived, the dance floor was already crowded, the beat was intoxicating and she could step in and lose herself.

So she did. 

She danced alone. She danced with others, in a more or less ‘you’re dancing near me and we are sometimes making eye contact’ sort of way. But she didn’t go to them. They came to her.

Jasper. Nathan Miller. Monroe. Harper. Monty. Octavia and Lincoln. Raven, who moved everything but her feet to the beat. Wick. Other survivors from the drop ship, blurring in the music and the rythym and the dark, flickering room.

It wasn’t just the beat that was intoxicating. There was plenty of fresh moonshine. Real live whiskey, actually. Fresh mash carried up from a branching segment of the Woods Clan that farmed corn and rye in the Roanoke Valley, to the southwest of Mt. Weather.

It was unlike anything they’d had on the Ark, and it went down so smoothly – after the first few bitter mouthfuls.

At some point someone who loved partner dancing shoved Diesel off the stage and took control of the consoles. Clarke wasn’t as good at these dances, but she gave it her all. 

She danced with Captain Miller, Harper, Nathan, Mr. Jordan, Mrs. Green, Wick, Raven, Octavia, Lincoln, others she didn’t know. She even danced with her mother and then Kane. She danced with anyone and everyone as they passed her hand-to-hand under the sparkling lights of the dance floor. Until she found herself dancing with Bellamy. Who of course knew these dances as well as the other free-form kind. Stupid, irritating renaissance asshole that he was. Ass. Who had a nice ass.

She’d seen him early on, dancing with his sister. Absolutely did not notice his ass then. No siree, she did not. She saw him out of the corner of her eye once more after that, after the music changed. He was guiding Echo through some of the simpler steps. Of course she picked them up quickly, moving gracefully under his touch. Clarke looked away, and when she looked for them again they were lost in the crowd.

Lincoln also proved to be a fast learner and to the delight of everyone who witnessed it, not only did he dance with Chancellor Griffin, he even got Indra out on the floor.

She did totally notice that Lexa hardly danced at all, but nevertheless seemed to be constantly standing just off the floor in Clarke’s field of vision, her hands all over some Trikru girl Clarke had never seen before. She did not meet Lexa’s eyes, but she did dance a little harder, maybe a little closer to whoever she was with at the time.

Yet it somehow was a surprise to her when once again she spun into different hands, and knew them. Big, broad, long fingered hands. Calluses and scars. Warm hands. Bellamy’s hands.

“Hey Princess,” he said as he spun her into his chest. “Having fun?”

“Yeah,” She smiled, pleased to discover it was even true. Mostly true. True enough. “I am having fun.”

“How many trips to the booze tent have you made?”

“Um,” she frowned, now acutely aware of how muzzy and lightheaded she was. Dancing was really thirsty work after all. And she hadn’t made hardly any trips. She’d sent various people to do it for her. “I’m not sure?”

“That’s about what I thought. When this song is over, come with me to get some food and coffee, yeah?”

“They sent you on an intervention?” She tried not to feel slighted. That he’d only come to dance with her because he was the one nominated to tell her she was drinking too much.

“No. I tried to get Wick to do it,” he grinned at her. “But he’s huge coward.”

She didn’t want to feel more mollified than she had felt slighted. To know it was Bellamy who’d noticed and wanted to do something about it. She did anyway.

“He blew up the dam. While he was still in it. He’s not that much of a coward,” she said.

“Telling the Wanheda to lay off the whiskey for a while is way more terrifying that blowing up a dam. Even if you are still in it. Trust me.”

“Hmpph.”

“Song’s done. Come on.” He took her hand, holding it securely in his own as he wove them through the crowd.


	3. Bellamy

When he got to the gate, Bellamy realized he’d left his heavy outer coat behind. He debated heading back to Echo’s quarters to retrieve it, but decided to do without. The distance to the Meeting Hall wasn’t that far, and keeping track of his coat in the crush was a pain.

Besides, the freeze-your-nose-hairs cold would wake him up. Solstice was always an endurance test, and he had a duty shift coming up and then he was standing for the reading. 

It had been a long night already. He and Echo had attended the formal dinner with the Chancellor and all the other visiting dignitaries, including Indra and Lexa and their retinues, and various important members of the Ark governing body. Clarke, he had noticed with some envy, had successfully blown it off. She’d claimed that as she was only an advisor, she wasn’t high-ranking enough to be needed. Kane had started to argue, but then the Chancellor had cut him short, reminding him that Clarke and Lexa in the same room didn’t necessarily bode well for anyone. Clarke had come back from her meeting with the Trikru Heda nearly sparking with fury, but had refused to say anything other than ‘our current truce is fine.’

Bellamy hadn’t been able to blow off the formal dinner. He was a member of Kane’s staff and a ranking officer in what was, by default as well as design, the military force of Mt. Weather. Echo, of course, was there as the Azgeda Ambassador. They weren’t there as a couple. But everyone – at the dinner, in the mountain, who visited the mountain, probably people who only knew people who visited the mountain – knew they were together anyway. The world was small and gossip was fast. 

Unlike Indra and Lexa, Echo didn’t have a retinue, something he’d never really thought about before. Tonight wasn’t the night to get into why, although he filed it away to pursue later. But she could go toe to toe with Indra and Lexa in the haughtiness department and win, so it didn’t seem to matter much in the end.

The dinner in the Meeting Hall was another one of Kane’s productions. Meticulously calculated to show just enough wealth and comfort to be hosting the Trikru as equals, but not show too much. Not enough to make the prize of the mountain look worth the enormous effort it would take to win it. Or one worthy of too many regrets. 

The menu alone had taken Kane a week to nail down. Fresh lettuce, apples and carrots. No citrus, no pineapples, no berries. The Mountain hydroponic floors produced those things too, but Kane didn’t want to show them off. Cabbage, rutabagas and winter squash. Bread rolls made from potato flour. Things that could be stored for winter – though theirs actually weren’t. Fresh meat that had been provided by hunters in the last few days, not taken from the Mountain’s poultry or hog stocks. The after-super sweet was cookies made with rice flour. 

The rough tables and benches in the Hall were merely temporarily banged together from fresh boards laid along sawhorses and log rounds. No linens other than napkins. The decorations were all from trees. Leaves, pine boughs, pine cones, branches with red berries, holly. Bellamy thought this last touch would be wasted effort, but then Indra of all people noticed it. It allowed Kane to talk about his mother, and her spiritual faith, and then ask about theirs. Because he’d brought up his mother, Indra actually felt compelled to offer up a few things. Sly Bastard.

It was also easy to take down the tables and benches and clear them away for the dancing afterwards. 

Echo was stiff as hell at first, bewildered by the informality of it all, but gradually got into the music, especially with Octavia’s and Lincoln’s encouragement. After a few hours of vigorous dancing, Echo was so tired and sleepy she had actually been weaving on her feet. It was obvious enough that one lady even came up to ask him – very kindly – if maybe Echo had had a little bit too much to drink.

He’d smiled rather grimly and assured the nosy old bitch that Echo was fine, merely tired. And pregnant, although he said that last part only inside his head. It would be public soon enough. Then he took Echo home. She’d protested, but not very vehemently. He was pretty sure she was asleep before she hit the pillow. He’d kicked off his boots and stretched out beside her. Just for a minute, he’d promised himself. Forty-five minutes later he was sprinting for the Meeting Hall and wishing he’d at least brought a hat. 

The first thing he saw, once his eyes adjusted to the glittering lights, was Clarke. Still dancing, but more wildly than before, more unsteadily, and whoops, Morales had to move really fast to keep her on her feet. She was a lot unsteadier than she’d been when he left with Echo. 

Falling down drunk would not be a good look on their hero.

He nudged Wick, tried to get him to intervene. 

“Man? Are you insane? No, I am not going to go tell Clarke she’s cut off.”

“She likes you.”

“No. She likes Raven and Raven puts up with me.”

“I’m standing right here,” Raven said. “I like you just fine.”

“Would you go get her?” Bellamy asked Raven.

“And have her knock me on my ass, so I can trip half a dozen people with my cane? Thanks. No.”

“How much has she had to drink?”

“Did you appoint me to Clarke babysitting brigade, only forget to actually tell me that?”

“No.”

“Go get her yourself. Dad.”

“Ha ha not at all funny, Reyes.”

He headed for the blond head glowing in the center of the crowd. 

In the food tent, he loaded up her plate with cold venison sandwiches and the French fries that the commissary team was producing by the bucketful, then planted her at a table while he went to find her coffee.

When he returned, she was sucking down the food so fast he worried it would all come straight back up again. A year of janitorial duty had given him a keen appreciation for the consequences of drunkenness. Fortunately, he had a distraction ready to hand.

“Clarke?”

“Hm?

“Why is Lexa flaunting her new girlfriend at you?” He gestured with a slight jerk of his chin and a shift in his eyes. Lexa and several of her retinue/body guards had entered the food tent not long after they did, and taken a table nearby.

“Oh,” Clarke said as airily as possible, “I don’t know.”

Bellamy just gave her a look.

“Okay,” she beckoned him closer, leaning over the narrow table so she could whisper. “She might have kissed me once. I might have kissed her back. A little. Once.”

Well, well, well, he thought, wasn’t that an interesting piece of new information. It shed light on at least some of Clarke’s fury after their meeting a few days ago. “When was that?” he asked.

“Oh. In her camp tent.” She sat back, curling her lip in disgust. “Before the invasion that wasn’t. It was kind of a surprise.” She looked at Bellamy then, her eyes open wide with wonder, and he realized she was completely in earnest when she said, “I didn’t know she saw me like that.”

“Saw you like what?” 

“You know. As someone to kiss.”

Clarke’s skin was still flushed from dancing, her hair had fallen out of whatever style she’d put it up in, her eyes were a little glassy with whiskey, her voice was particularly husky from hours of singing along with the music and she looked so worried that he didn’t know whether to laugh or swear. To keep himself from saying something incredibly awkward like, ‘I’ve always thought you looked like someone I’d like to kiss,’ he said, “She really kissed you?”

“Yes! Is that so hard to believe? That someone might want to kiss me?”

“No.” He held up his hands and shook his head, wondering why on earth Clarke thought that about herself. “Not hard to believe at all.” 

As soon as he framed the question in his head, though, he had the answer. Finn Collins. Screwer-over of fantastic girls who deserved way better than his tepid and self-serving attention. If the guy weren’t dead, it would have been Bellamy’s pleasure to put him on permanent scouting duty. Far from the mountain. Let him freeze his balls off for the rest of the winter. Every winter. For the duration.

Not that he’d ever imagined that Commander Lexa would want to kiss Clarke, or that she would actually do it. Or that Clarke would like it. 

Clarke was still looking at him, her expression rather like that of a child expecting to be learn the final truth about Santa Claus, bracing for the disappointment to come. 

“You are very kissable,” he assured her, and if, for a brief moment he wondered, again, what it might be like to kiss her, it was because he was human. And he really liked girls, and her mouth had gone soft and open and she had the saddest expression in her eyes – and a kiss from him, right now, was about the stupidest idea in the history of ever. Between her confusion and his life with Echo, him kissing her now would lead to nothing but epic disaster. “Really and truly kissable,” he said firmly.

She raised her chin, looking pleased, “Good.”

He settled back on the bench, reaching for his coffee, and said encouragingly, “So. You kissed her back?”

“Just a little.” Clarke smiled softly, “It was a nice surprise, you know? But it was also weird, and unexpected and I wasn’t ready and I pulled back. So much was going on, you know? Finn was barely dead a week, and she didn’t warn anyone in TonDC about the missile and I agreed because she said it was the only way to save you and save the mission, keep you from being discovered, and she knew I valued you too much to lose you, and then she was going to have Octavia killed after she figured it out and then …”

“Wait.” Oddly fascinated by Clarke’s interest in Lexa, however doomed to disaster he knew it was because Lexa was … Lexa, Bellamy sort of missed the middle of what Clarke said, but he caught at the tail end of the flood of information. He’d already known about the missile thing, Raven and Octavia had both told him so that wasn’t news, but this, “Did you say – Lexa knew you valued me, but at the same time she was going to kill my sister?”

That certainly was an interesting choice on Lexa’s part. If Lincoln hadn’t killed her first, Bellamy would have done it for him. Or they both would have died trying and Clarke would have been left more isolated than before. 

What a conniving, loathsome bitch.

“Yes. I stopped her.” Clarke glowered across the tent. “She didn’t trust Octavia’s word. Because she’s a big old lying liar herself. Her word doesn’t mean a damn thing, so why would anyone else’s mean anything either?” 

He had been, at best, ambivalent about Lexa when the Arkers first started dealing with her. At his worst, with memories of standing in front of Roma’s corpse creeping up on him, or Raven’s screams in pain and panic, he would have found it quite satisfying to run a spear through Lexa himself. Then, after the mountain, he’d pretty much written Lexa off completely as a waste of human space. Albeit a politically important one he would have to deal with regularly for all of the foreseeable future. Now he knew exactly how Kane and Jaha had felt about Diana Sydney. While this news didn’t lower his opinion of Lexa any further, since that wasn’t really possible, it certainly fanned his distrust. “That’s a good question,” he said to Clarke.

“And then, can you believe, when we met a week ago, she actually said she still wanted to ….to…” Clarke trailed off, waving her hands, flailing helplessly for words. 

Then she looked up at him, some kind of weird light in her eye. “I am a liar magnet, aren’t I? A fucking liar magnet. An electromagnet! My mom. Wells. Finn. Lexa. What the hell is wrong with me?” She banged her hands down on the table top, making dishes rattle, to emphasize her question.

Bellamy reached out and caught her hands, pressing them flat into the tabletop.

“Nothing, Clarke. Nothing at all,” He relaxed his hold on her hands enough to turn them into his grip and gently squeeze her fingers, trying to communicate as much by touch as his voice, into which he poured all the conviction he could muster. Clarke deserved so much better than all this. “You aren’t a liar magnet and the whole world turned upside down in the last few months. It will right itself and you will find people who don’t lie to you.” He let go and crossed his arms to lean on them. “Have the rest of your sandwich and finish your coffee. I’ll stay with you until I have to go on duty.”

“What! Why?”

“Clarke. You’re heading for drunken sobbing, or possibly a screaming confrontation with Lexa, and you’re starting to talk too loud. Once you’ve eaten, let’s go find Raven and Octavia and skip all that, okay?”


	4. The Reading

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "This is our first Solstice on the ground. And it’s been a hell of a year.”

Abby stood at the front of the Meeting Hall, giving directions to the group hanging the screen. It was just after 4:00 am, outside the moon was just setting. The reading would start in less than an hour and they were running a little behind on set up.

“Abby,” Kane said from behind her, “the screen is fine.”

Abby looked at him, glanced back at the screen, and nodded. She waved to the crew. “It’s fine. Good. Thanks.”

The mirrored ball was still turning, but the room lights had been brought up just enough for the volunteers to see what they were doing. Clearing away the music equipment, resetting the stage, setting out the projection equipment. The people who’d been blanketing the floor, sitting in small groups and singing along with old rock power ballads and folk music classics were shuffling to their feet and filing out to bring in the benches. 

“I know," she said. "It’s just – this is our first Solstice on the ground. And it’s been a hell of a year.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think we’ve timed it right?”

“Sinclair has run the numbers for you about two dozen times. I think we’ve got it.”

“I know he has. But – there are so many more names this year.”

Kane just nodded.

“And the screen images won’t be too cheesy?”

“They’re incredibly cheesy, Abby. Nothing will ever replace seeing space from above the atmosphere. Somehow, down here, even though I know that those are real images of what I saw with my own eyes looking out the windows of the Ark, they do look fake and goofy. But they are as close as you and I and most of us here will ever come to touching the stars again.”

“I never thought about how much I could miss it.”

“We were born and raised up there. It was, however fragile, our home. It had it’s own terrible beauty.”

Abby thought again of the view of the earth from the Ark. The planet had floated below them, serene and untouchable, hiding all its ferocious, abundant, verdant life under its glorious colors. The rock to which they had all yearned to send a generation as yet unborn. A generation that might still yet never be born, if they bungled the next few years as badly as the one they had just barely survived.

“I sometimes miss weightlessness,” she said.

“Sometimes? I miss it every morning. Nothing like gravity 24/7 to remind me that my knees are old.”

Abby chuckled under her breath, then turned to answer a question about the podium.

At 4:30 am, and again at 4:45 am, they sounded the same chimes that they’d used on the Ark to call people to together. The loudspeakers hanging from the exterior corners of the Meeting Hall sent the message to everyone on the plateau – in the food tents grabbing coffee and a roll before the Reading, or, like their Trikru guests, resting in the converted Quonset hut dorms.

People began streaming in, seats in front reserved for those reading, and seats just behind saved for Lexa and her senior advisors.

Abby looked for Clarke, and was relieved to see her sitting toward the front half of the room with a large group of her friends.

Odd how everything worked out, she thought. Clarke had never had many friends her own age on the Ark. Between the burden of being her parents’ daughter, with the privileges and distances that created, and her close friendship with Wells Jaha, she’d only made glancing efforts at broadening her circle among the other kids her own age. She’d make a few friends each year in school, but they would fade away as the next year began, replaced with a new group, each little cohort fading in and out of her life as she grew up.

Now Clarke seemed surrounded, for as much of her free time as she would permit it, by the remaining members of the delinquents and their grateful families. It was hardly enough to qualify as a silver lining after this most horrific year, but it was a positive enough change to bolster Abby’s often-flagging faith in their future. Between the unknown ‘her’ who had perhaps been the proximate cause of Armageddon and might still be active, and the seething tensions between the clans over past and current injustices and disputes, she had to actively struggle against sinking into a black depression. She treasured any positive development against overwhelming – but maybe not quite inescapable – despair.

Clarke’s newfound friendships were one such talisman. Another was Echo and her baby. She and Bellamy caught Abby’s eye as they slipped in just before the projector started up, taking seats in the front because Bellamy was one of the readers. If this baby was born healthy and strong, he or she could be a sign and symbol that a future without war could be possible. If Arkers and Grounders could find their way forward together and not sink into a last gasp of frenzied bloodletting that would destroy them all.

It was a heavy burden to heap on one baby and two young people brought together by the potent alchemy of sex, death and survivor guilt rather than friendship, affection or love, she knew, but she could and did believe that they were strong enough to bear it. That other couples and other babies would follow in the next few years. Assuming they lived through them.

At 4:50 am, the lights dimmed and the projector came on.

At five o’clock, the chimes sounded again.

Abby stood and walked to the center of the small stage, now cleared of the sound deck and set with a single podium, lit by a small lamp shaded so as not to feature the speaker or detract from the images on the screen. Images of space, the blue globe of Earth floating beneath them, taken by the Ark’s many cameras on all the solstices before this one, the last 97 years wheeling majestically past on the screen.

In deference to their guests, and as a reminder to themselves, she began. “Once each year, we of the Ark take the time to remember. Our journey on board the twelve stations that combined to form our Ark has been long, and harrowing at times. The rules that we lived by have been as unyielding as the vacuum of space. Many have died that we live on. We owe them our thanks and gratitude.”

She paused, waiting for the shuffling to settle as the last of the latecomers slipped in to sit along the back wall.

“We honor them by remembering their names.”

She stepped aside as the oldest living survivor to reach the ground, Ellen Hanushka, took her place at the podium.

Her voice wavering at first, but growing stronger as she spoke, she began the Reading with the names of the original Grounders, the four hundred who survived on the twelve stations and came together to construct the Ark nearly a century ago. “Janet Fry. Lucky Edl. Kent Cameron. Hugh McInnis. Jerry Reynolds. Darren Lukacevic. Dana Bartlett. Jim McMullin. Viv Humphrey. Xavier Spokane. Mark Vivian. Iman Jaha…” 

The images of the stars wheeled on behind the speakers, more than forty of them, as they rose one by one to read a hundred or so names, in the order of their passing.

The reading was twice as long as it had ever been. This last year had taken an enormous toll on the Ark and it’s people. Nearly four thousand of their number would be remembered tonight.

Their voices rose and fell, men and women, quavering and strong. The oldest readers read the oldest names, and as they worked their way toward the present she could feel the room bracing for the losses of the last year.

For the first time, like nearly everyone else who had survived earthfall, Abby would know and could recall most of the faces of the dead. Not as blurry images, barely remembered from childhood, but as adults. As children. As friends, and colleagues, acquaintances or patients, she had known them. Touched them. Been touched by them. She knew them. Knew their children. Knew their names.

Their names washed over her, weighing her down with their memories and their sacrifices.

“Adele Jaha.”

“Jack Murphy.”

“Carmen Reyes.”

“Olga Murphy.”

“Aurora Blake.”

She waited, dreading the inevitable moment as it grew closer. For her, this last, most bloody year would begin with one name. It arrived just less than half way through the list of the dead.

“Jake Griffin.”

She did not want to look to Clarke. She could not bear it. Whatever Clarke did – look away, glare, cry – it would be too much. She looked anyway. Clarke’s head was bowed and Abby could not see her face.

When her turn came again, Abby resumed her place at the podium, beginning her reading of the first of the three hundred and twenty deaths of the culling, her penance and her right. “Tor Lemkin. Sarah Ridley…”

Sinclair took the middle third, Marcus Kane the last.

The list rolled on.

On to the losses of the Unity Day explosion, “Vera Kane. Juan Cole. Ivan Kaplan. Ejau Muir. Matthew Fuji…”

David Miller read the names of those lost to Diana Syndey’s treason on her stolen drop ship.

Then came the horrible stretch when the names of the fifteen hundred more who died as a result of the damage to the Ark were read. Fifteen readers, one by one took their turn. Another six readers then stood for those who had taken the last great leap towards the Earth but had died along the way.

It took nearly two hours to read the full listing of the dead.

Those who survived to sit in the new Meeting Hall on the top of Mt. Weather as the Solstice night wore on had cried, and grown still and wept again. Memory and time had filled the quiet noises of gentle tears as the Reading began. As it ground its inexorable way forward, reaching into the present, to the mothers and fathers and sons and daughters who had survived, the weeping grew deeper, a hoarse, growling current of pain yet uncapped. Flowing out like a black river into the deepest part of the dark, just before the dawn.

Bellamy Blake was the last to read. Speaking for the children he had done his best to lead, and shelter and save, and lost, he read the names of those who had died on the ground. “Glenn Dickson. Trina Woodley. Atom Luckacevic. Pascal Girad. Tomas Witherspoon. Wells Jaha. Charlotte Fry. John Mbege. Roma Cordero…”

Once Bellamy finished, a long period of silence fell, broken only by the wrenching sounds of heartache. At last, Marcus took the podium again. He concluded the Reading with the benediction of the Ark, the only one they had ever had. “We re-commit these souls to the deep, who at their last gave all in the hopes of a new world for the living. May they be remembered forever, until there is no more pain, no more suffering, and the abyss itself shall give up her dead and return them to us.”

As he finished, he switched off the light at the podium and on this cue, the projector dimmed, and those waiting at the entrance opened the double doors together, creating a gap of slightly more than a span of two hands. The cold air flowing in was sharp and cold, breaking the atmosphere thick with sorrow with the scent of fresh snow. The strip of sky between the doors was a glowing column, pale rose gold at the base and rising to a deepening blue at the top, blindingly bright against the blackness of the interior of the Hall.

Slowly at first, but more quickly with each passing minute, the burning red gold light of the sun reached over the horizon and filled the lower half of the opening, casting a radiant yellow line down the center of the hall until it reached the podium itself, where, during the darkness, Kane had placed the Book of Names, saved from the Ark after it fell.

Like the great standing stones of millennia past, the building itself had been sited for just this event, the doors working to frame the moment when the sun would break over the eastern horizon at the turning of the year, creep across the lowlands and up the foothills until it, at last, reached this place.

As the sun broke completely free from the edge of the earth, the doors were opened wide, and Kane called, “It is a new dawn. We are on the Earth, and we have at last rejoined our long sundered human kin. The tree is strong, and we are alive. May we, all of us, prosper in the year to come.”


End file.
